Smell as AI’s missing sense

AI research largely ignores olfaction: papers on artificial smell have been flat while vision and language work exploded, and major conferences show little interest. Human smell interfaces with decision‑making, danger detection and social cognition, so omitting it risks blind spots in embodied and general AI. — If true, this omission reshapes what 'human‑level' AI can mean, affects safety assessments for embodied agents, and should influence research funding and dataset priorities.